Turkish-born artist Pinar Yolacan, who is based in Brooklyn, is best known for her portraits of ladies wearing clothes fashioned from meat parts (tripe, guts, assorted offal). She has a new show opening today at New York's Rivington Arms gallery. Snip from a Style.com feature:

This time around, the women are Afro-Brazilian, dressed in the style of the Portuguese colonizers, and the organ in question is the placenta of cows. That sounds repulsive, but like Yolacan's earlier photographs, these have a strange and haunting beauty.

She explains why meat is her medium in the Style.com interview...

How, exactly, do you make clothes from meat?

I make the clothes the morning of the shoot, so the meat doesn't rot. In Bahia, I froze it beforehand, so it wouldn't get smelly, because it's really hot. It's quite domestic, really–I have to buy meat, clean up, sew. For this series, I got the fabrics in local markets, and the meat, too. I try to accentuate each woman's skin tone and expression with the clothes; I take Polaroids of them when I first meet them, then I work from those.

OpenRoad.TV, the terrific video travel guide for the American West, joined CRAFT magazine blogger Natalie Zee Drieu and her pooch Lulu as they visited San Francisco's Embarcadero, home to the historic Ferry Building and Claes Oldenburg's huge "Cupid's Span" sculpture. This is the fifth episode in OpenRoad.TV's "Life Outside The Box" series where they're accompanying bloggers to their favorite real world spots. Link

Michael Carney, in a Teesside, England, court on charges of being a serial flasher, claimed that there's no way he could be guilty because his penis is so small that he's too embarrassed to show it anyone. The repeat offender was convicted of seven counts of "outraging public decency." From the BBC News:

During the three-day trial the defendant told the court: "It causes embarrassment to myself, even to the point where it is with my wife. I wouldn't want myself to be seen in public like that.

"My genitalia are underdeveloped and it is so much smaller than average."

The UK's first SMS service for finding the nearest toilet launched in London today. Just text the word "toilet" and SatLav, run by the Westminster City Council, points you the nearest public toilet. Someone should build a recommendation system on top of that and name it George, after the Seinfeld character who knew the location of every good bathroom in Manhattan. From the Associated Press:

The system, which covers 40 public toilets, pinpoints the caller's position by measuring the strength of the phone signal. The texts cost about 50 cents, and most of Westminster's toilets are free.

The council said it hopes the service will stop people from urinating in alleyways, saying some 10,000 gallons of urine ends up in Westminster streets each year.

Reason's Hit and Run blog reports that a British schoolteacher is will be tried for "blasphemy, inciting hatred, and insulting Islam" because she named a teddy bear Muhammad.

Contrary to reassurances from the Sudanese embassy in London, Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in Khartoum who did not realize naming a teddy bear Muhammad was verboten, has been charged with blasphemy, inciting hatred, and insulting Islam. The possible penalties include a fine, 40 lashes, and six months in jail. The government promises a "swift and fair trial," saying, "she will be brought in front of a judge, and now she must prove her innocence"–which gives you a sense of how the court system works in Sudan. Gibbons' lawyer says the defense will be straightforward: She had "absolutely no intention to insult religion, and for blasphemy to take place there must be an insult."

Twenty-two-year-old Felix Kha will be reunited with the marijuana police took from him two and a half years ago, ruled the 4th District Court of Appeal.

Lawyers for Garden Grove said they were not seeking to have the state's medical marijuana laws declared unconstitutional on pre-emptive grounds, but were simply arguing that the city did not want to be in the position of having to return marijuana to a patient once it has been seized -- lawfully under federal law -- by police.

Kha's attorneys argued that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution effectively prohibits federal interference with California's medical marijuana laws, and the three-justice panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal agreed.

The justices found that because, under state law, Kha was lawfully entitled to possess the marijuana, "due process and fundamental fairness dictate that it be returned to him."

The justices said Kha is "nothing more than an aggrieved citizen who is seeking the return of his property."

Jason Hackenwerth creates massive surreal balloon sculptures that can take more than a week to complete. This bizarre organism was blown and twisted for a gala last year at the New Museum New York. Link to Jason Hackenwerth site, Link to photos of a Hackenwerth installation at a wedding party (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio show Search Engine is soliciting your questions for an interview with Industry Minister Jim Prentice about the upcoming Canadian DMCA legislation, which will give Canada one of the most backwards copyright regimes in the world.

We want to give Canadians one last chance to be heard on this subject before their government moves forward, and that's why we're asking Industry Minister Jim Prentice on to Search Engine, to answer questions posed by you. We have every confidence that when Minister Prentice sees the amount of public concern on this topic, he'll make himself available for a conversation. Submit your questions in the comments.

The latest installment of the Hijinks Ensue webcomic dramatises the now-infamous Wired interview with Universal Music CEO Doug Morris in which the scared old man claimed that the record industry had been unable to respond to Napster because they don't understand technology and are too naive to hire a technologist to explain it to them because in their ignorance, they wouldn't be able to tell if s/he was lying.
Link
(Thanks, Emily!)

The organizers of last week's "cocktail robotics" festival in Vienna, Austria, the annual "Roboexotica" event, have posted the audio from the lectures in German and English. I gave a talk there called "A Singular Metaphor" in which I tried to delve into the reason that the idea of uploading our minds is so attractive right now. Sean Bonner had a fun talk on user power on sites like Digg called "The inmates have taken over the asylum...," while Jens Ohlig from the Chaos Computer Club proposed that robots should create all literature, David Fine pondered consciousness, and Make Magazine's Bre Pettis gave a talk called "Machines: If you can't beat them, join them," about the utopia of apocalypse.
Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)

Mark shows us how to make an explosive miniature cannon out of some breath spray and an empty film canister (don't try this at an airport, folks). Then, good foods gone bad -- an excerpt from "Snack Mansion," a short claymation film by Lauren Adolfsen. When the pizza makes out with the cookie and the banana barfs, you know it's a party.

Vernor Vinge has put the entire text of his magnificent, prescient, mind-alteringly good novel Rainbows End online as a free download. This was one of the best books of 2006, a book that practically defines what "post-cyberpunk" really means: stories about what happens when the world (and not the street) finds its own use for technology. The tech touches -- massive, augmented reality ARGs; adaptive full-body user-interfaces; destructive book-scanners -- are half-predictive, half-allegorical, and entirely provocative. What a treat!

The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for Defense against Disease. On July 23, schoolchildren in Algiers claimed that a respiratory epidemic was spreading across the Mediterranean. The claim was based on clever analysis of antibody data from the mass transit systems of Algiers and Naples.

CDD had no immediate comment, but in less than three hours, public-health hobbyists reported similar results in other cities, complete with contagion maps. The epidemic was at least one week old, probably originating in Central Africa, beyond the scope of hobbyist surveillance.

By the time CDD got its public relations act together, outbreaks had been detected in India and North America. Worse yet, a journalist in Seattle had isolated and identified the infectious agent, which turned out to be a Pseudomimivirus. That was about as embarrassing a twist as the public relations people could imagine: Back in the late 'teens, CDD had justified its enormous budget with a brilliant defense against the New Sunrise cult. The Sunrise Plague had been the second-worst Euro-terror of the decade. Only CDD's leadership had kept the disaster from spreading worldwide.

A pair of new Electronic Frontier Foundation reports prove that Comcast is degrading and interfering with BitTorrent, and shows how you can use free software to test your own ISP to see if it is doing the same:

In addition to providing evidence of network interference, the EFF study also explains how Comcast's selective degradation of BitTorrent traffic undermines future Internet innovation. "The Internet has enabled a cascade of innovations precisely because any programmer--whether employed by a huge corporation, a startup, or tinkering at home for fun--has been able to create new protocols and applications that operate over TCP/IP, without having to obtain permission from anyone," the EFF wrote. "Comcast's recent moves threaten to create a situation in which innovators may need to obtain permission and assistance from an ISP in order to guarantee that their protocols will operate correctly. By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are the foundation of the Internet."

The EFF also published a second report (PDF), which provides detailed technical instructions explaining how to use Wireshark to reproduce their study and test for ISP packet injection.

Google's chief spamfighter says that he's seeing less spam email coming into Google Mail and speculates that spammers are giving up on bulk spam because of the efficacy of filters; he predicts an enormous rise in quasi-spam from companies that you did business with once or twice and now feel entitled to email you all the time. I get craploads of this stuff myself -- PR releases (any PR person who puts me on a mailing list goes straight into my killfile, forever), circulars from some etailer I bought something from eight years ago, even monthly newsletters from a clinical massage place in Toronto I saw for a sore shoulder, once, in 1988. Unsubcribing to this stuff is time-consuming and only works about a third of the time, in my experience.

Of course, I also get thousands of spams a day (most of which are successfully repelled by greylisting, leaving only a thousand or so that get through to my mailer, which filters all but a couple hundred).

Google won't disclose numbers, but the company says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that's transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year. That could indicate that some spammers have gotten discouraged and have stopped trying to get through Google’s spam filters.

The MiShare is a matchbox-sized $100 Linux appliance that interfaces between two iPods and allows you to transfer files back and forth between them. This'd be great for bands that want to share their work with people who show up at gigs, and for sharing your CC-licensed music with friends at school or work. It's pre-order only now, alas.

We want miShare to be both simple and powerful. Just attach two iPods, slide miShare's on-switch to music, video or photo, and press miShare's only button. You decide whether you copy the song or video that was last played through to its end, or a pre-defined photo folder. Give the miShare button a longer press (three seconds) and it will copy a collection of files. miShare uses the On-The-Go playlist for multiple songs–just create an On-The-Go playlist on the source iPod by selecting by song, artist, album, or even playlist.

Gary sez, "For Pixar's upcoming film Wall*E, they studio has created a very detailed website for Buy n' Large, the corporation that is credited as part of the cause of human civilization's descent into couch dwelling sloths. The site in and of itself is a fantastic, yet subtle, send up of corporate policies and puffery. Pixar's gentle, yet pointed, satire is amusing throughout the surprisingly massive site.

"But the true brilliance lays in the Buy n Large Disclaimer. It's fantastic. In fact, the brilliance starts on the homepage where they state 'Opt-out requests may be ignored as we do not send this site or any communications to anyone.'"

Buy n Large will share your personal information with third parties whenever it deems such sharing to be advantageous to it, including when you engage in certain activities on our site such as using a menu, viewing, clicking your mouse or breathing. Buy n Large will also share your personal information when you respond to promotional materials from Buy n Large and authorize a third party to use your personal information for purposes such as, for example, sending you additional promotional materials that further obligate you (and your family) to receive additional promotional materials, providing you a product or service, or entering you in a contest, sweepstakes or game that will usually require a financial obligation on the part of the user.

By visiting Buy n Large you are contractually obligated to read all email that is sent to you via the Buy n Large servers. Failure to do so will be considered of a breach of contract.

We automatically log all information about your computer's connection to the Internet, which we call "Buy n Large Property". Buy n Large Property consists of things such as IP address, operating system and type of browser software being used and the activities conducted by the user while on our site (or other sites). We may also use some of the Buy n Large Property, such as the pages you visited on our site (or other sites), to send you e-mail messages (such as "Buy n Large requires you to join our Buy n Large Corporate Street Team. Failure to do so will result in legal action") focused on products that we feel you should (or must) be interested in and now are contractually obligated to be interested in.

Following up on yesterday's post about the forthcoming Canadian DMCA bill, Zelda's written a "satirical overview of how the upcoming Canadian copyright bill came about, and who the major players are."

Minister Stephen Harper lashed out Wednesday at critics who say the Canadian public was not properly consulted in the planned revision of the Copyright Act, widely expected to be tabled before Christmas.

"To suggest that we didn't ask Canadians what they wanted is irresponsible," he told reporters outside an upscale Ottawa restaurant. "There were thousands of pages of testimony from the public, and I can tell you it took [Time Warner CEO] Rich Parsons and I almost a full week to burn it at all that Whistler retreat."

My cinephile pal and blog-colleague Pesco mentioned the French New Wave classic "Deux Filles, Une Tasse" earlier this week on BoingBoing -- and look here! One of our kind readers has just pointed us to a film student's review on the popular website Flickr. If you've never seen "2 GIRLS 1 CUP," as the Truffaut-influenced masterwork is colloquially known on the internet, do yourself a favor and do not bother because it is like goatse times a million tubgirls divided by maggots. Link, via fuxoft.

Noah Shachtman has new piece out in Wired exploring the reported drop in violence in Iraq in recent months. He argues that this is the result of the US abandoning its somewhat techno-centric approach to prosecuting the war -- and focusing instead on Iraq's social, political, tribal, and cultural networks. Snip:

The war was launched, in part, on a premise that you could wipe out
more bad guys with fewer troops, as long as those troops were
networked together. Businesses like Wal-Mart made their supply chain
more efficient through information technology; the military could do
the same with its "kill chain," the theory of network-centric warfare
went.

The idea -- first popularized in article published ten years ago, next
month -- pretty much worked as advertised, for a while. The problem
is, killing people more efficiently is one of the last things you need
to do a counterinsurgency situation, like the one the U.S. is facing
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, you need to take steps to reinforce
civil society, rather than blowing it apart. And that takes an
understanding of the society you're trying to build.

For the story, I scored a rare opportunity to spend time with a U.S.
"psychological operations" team, getting into the heads of the people
of Fallujah; hung out with an Army colonel who worked his tribal
connections to bring stability to one of Iraq's roughest towns; spent
time with the heads of a controversial program to embed
anthropologists into combat units; and interviewed General David
Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq.

Link. More out-takes from the reporting process will no doubt show up in Noah's blog posts at Danger Room.

Photo: shot by Todd Hido in Iraq for Wired. A tattered flag flies from a cell phone antenna.

An incredible 4-unit motel designed by John Lautner in 1947 is on the market. It’s in Desert Hot Springs.

The owner died in March and the price has been falling rapidly. it’s been reduced from $745 to $495. There has been some discussion of a group purchase over on the ModCom message board.

I wonder if you know someone that would like this desert vacation property – or they could continue to run it as a motel. Lautner’s work is amazing and interest will certainly soar with next year’s major exhibition at the Hammer museum.

HORRORSHOW features almost FIFTY brand new paintings inspired by a variety of whacked-out horror, cult and exploitation films. Malo Cantina will be providing a margarita bar, and we'll have movie theater-style treats like popcorn and candy on hand too. Hope to see you at the opening!

Shown here: one of the awesome "Baseball Furies" gang members from The Warriors. These guys never spoke a word throughout the entire movie.Link

Investigative journalist Scott Carney has been working for the last half a year or so on a story about grave robbers in Calcutta who steal skeletons and sell them to medical supply companies in the US and Europe.

"To research the story I combed the state of West Bengal and saw huge piles of police-confiscated bones," he explains. "I even spoke to some of the people who deflesh human bodies for a living."

Images here (shot by Scott): (left): A police officer in Burdwan, West Bengal, displays a cache of skulls confiscated from a bone factory run by Mukti Biswas on the outskirts of Kolkata. (right top): A bag of femurs recovered by West Bengal police. (right bottom): The gated entrance to Young Brothers in Kolkata. The company sells human remains at wholesale prices.